Edition:

Ask a stupid question

Steven Poole and Vera Rule on A Little Book of Dumb Questions | The Smiths: Songs That Saved Your Life | Don't Drop the Coffin! | Empire: A Very Short Introduction | Noblesse Oblige | The Penguin Dictionary of Epigrams

This small compendium of queries seems to be guided by no systematic taxonomy. It would be philosophically interesting to examine the tradition of provocative dumbness, from Diogenes to Dude Where's My Car?, and the author indeed promises that he has collected the "dumbest and yet most strangely profound questions of all time". But too many of them are simply tedious attempts at wordplay, to which there is an obvious correct answer. "If a stealth bomber crashed in a forest, would it make a sound?" Well, yes, because stealth technology involves the damping of radar reflectivity, not the suppression of engine noise. Duh. Slightly more sophisticated in this vein is: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one's there to hear it, do the other trees laugh?", and there is also the odd glint of a centuries-old paradox recast: "If all generalisations are false, is this one true?"SP

The author has explicitly modelled his book on Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head, the song-by-song masterwork of Beatles criticism. The template works fairly well, although Goddard rarely says anything very sophisticated about the music, and the language can be confused: he contrasts "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" with Wham!'s contemporaneous "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go", and calls the latter "the antithesis of hedonistic Thatcherite pop", when he surely means the opposite. (This is also a superficial and wrong-headed account of the art of Wham!, common among those who feel that to value indie music is necessarily to despise what is commercially successful.) Goddard has interviewed bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce, and ploughed through the latter's archive of outtakes and rehearsals. Fans will be sated with fascinating facts, even if the book is unlikely to convince the faithless. SP

Its alarmingly wacky title is bound to put off thousands, but this Bermondsey undertaker's memoir is actually rather good, being a warm account of south-east London society that mixes touchingly respectful portrayals of ordinary grief with occasional flashes of surreal half-comedy. East End gangsters figure here in a refreshingly unflattering light - having to bury their victims means that Albin-Dyer is loath to join in the fashionable glamorisation of such moronic thugs. He also helpfully explains the Victorian roots of modern burial traditions and details the bizarre procedures behind what he calls the "techno funeral" - the freezing of the bodies of the optimistically wealthy so that they may be revived in some distant future. The style has the rather flat quality familiar in books dictated to amanuenses, but Albin-Dyer none the less comes over as a thoughtful, less precious version of the American poet-undertaker Thomas Lynch. SP

Empire: A Very Short Introduction, by Stephen Howe (Oxford, £6.99)

As well as explaining the histories of the empires belonging to the British, the Austro-Hungarians, the French and Chinese, Howe examines what it might mean today to call the actions of, say, the US government "imperialist" or "colonialist", when such labels have been disapprobative for only a relatively short period. (What did the Roman empire ever do for us? ... Even now, despite its bloodiness, that empire can be regarded, Howe shows, as a glorious civilising influence: certainly the Germanic hordes in Ridley Scott's Gladiator looked barbarous enough to be asking for it.) Panoramic overviews of "Empire by Land" and "Empire by Sea" are followed by analyses of the messy breakups of empires, and an interesting examination of "cultural imperialism", with the unexpected example of Congolese music, with its pan-African and subsequent global success, currently looking to be more durable than that of McDonald's. SP

Noblesse Oblige, Ed. Nancy Mitford (Oxford Language Classics, £6.99)

In its time - 1956, although it now reads like 1856 - this assemblage of snobberies provoked resentful anger. It presented to a wide audience a paper that Alan Ross, professor of linguistics at Birmingham University, published in the Bulletin of the Neo-Philological Society of Helsinki, Finland. So far, so academically safe: but the subject of his research had been upper-class English usage, and his classifications of what was and was not "U" were used by Nancy Mitford as a basis for an essay teasing her social inferiors. To that was added a riposte by Evelyn Waugh, then other glosses, only two of which retain their fun: a Betjeman poem with as many non-U usages as possible, and a masterpiece cartoon by Osbert Lancaster illustrating, without Waugh's and Mitford's spite, a century of genteel aspiration - his rendering of a pouffe before a fake log fire in the lounge is worth the price of the book in itself. VR

The Penguin Dictionary of Epigrams, Ed. MJ Cohen (Penguin, £7.99)

I opened this at random, and that was the morning gone - in fact, half an hour has dissolved between typing the price and reaching this far while I re-read taut one-liners from Tom Stoppard, pensées by Pascal and maxims by Marcus Aurelius, crisp-cut as Roman lettering in stone. Then there's the 14th-century mystical treatise, "The Cloud of Unknowing", on the nature of time, and far too much Oscar Wilde - but then, he is classified in the index as an "epigrammist" (would that be a profession, a vocation, or just an excuse?). Epigrammists sound as if they all knew each other, as Elias Canetti wrote; or rather, as if they had all agreed to compress truth to maximum compact hardness, and then polish it so that the resultant brilliance might get it picked up, if only by each other. I daren't begin quoting - all right, just the one: "He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone" - Oscar, of course, in Vera, or the Nihilists. VR

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